Monthly Archives: April 2015

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Our project addresses the themes of trust, information credibility and the relationship between fads and crises. We are using food safety and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as target issues because the information surrounding them is notoriouslyhyperbolic and their proponents are stereotypically ill-informed or easily persuaded.

We are creating a pseudo-scientific food safety product, Spekkl, that targets overtly health-conscious parents—mommies and daddies actively anti-GMO blogging and shopping. The caregiving and protective nature of these parents makes them an especially susceptible audience within the realm of food safety.

Related Work

Works of satire and designed hoaxes were influential to the way we approached our project.

Finding a topic: Our team was interested in food because it is a necessity to life, and therefore can ignite highly controversial futures. We began to look at large, evil food manufacturers like Monsanto and the anti-GMO movement as starting points for areas of conflict.

Deciding an angle: We chose to, rather than pick a side of the GMO issue, use the topic as a method of critiquing the naivety of those that buy/write/discuss in reaction to it. We decided on a near-future scenario that would bring the issues of credibility and trust to a more believable, and possibly shocking, reality.

Creating a product and brand: We used our strengths as industrial and communication designers to build believable prototypes, renders and online content for the fake product. We believed these elements to be essential to creating a convincing project. The product’s form was inspired by products that are similarly trusted by our audience: baby thermometers and infrared meat thermometers. The brand materials such as logo, color and pattern were created to be friendly and relate to our key audience of parents.

Developing brand language and communications: Online content and our audience-reaching methods of website and marketing e-mails relied on fine-tuned language that delivered approachable authority. Again, realness was key. Our email marketing was sent to the food safety and wellness blogosphere, complete with a thank you coupon and link to the official product press release on the product website.

Response: An important part of the project is witnessing and recording how participants react to the fake product. We will send the email to our blogger list in the coming days and wait to see what their response is. We will be keeping track of pre-orders on the Spekkl website to understand the number of people who seem to believe and want to own the product.

Reflection

Throughout the project we have more clearly come to understand that it’s too easy to make fake things. We haven’t confirmed that people will believe our product, but the process to make a pretty convincing, bogus product was fast and simple. We used free or cheap online services to build a functioning website and marketing email. This makes us question the responsibility held by designers and the power we put in their hands. Do we feel evil? Not really, but we’re a little scared by potential susceptibility of our audience.

Core Concept:
The Anti-Intellectualism Association is a satire organization which promotes anti-intellectualism in the US, believing normal, everyday good people should be running our country. The AIA believes carelessly questioning our society damages America’s exceptionalism.

The goal of this project is to present a fictionalized organization or superpac that is both tongue in cheek and critical of the anti-intellectual movement that has been present in the US since it’s inception. To goal is to initiate discussion and reflection on cognitive biases, to better represent that each of us are sometime hesitant to believe the educated “expert” in a field when they do not align with our existing belief structure.

Design Process
The process included quite a bit of research, to see how existing superpacs, political organizations, and associations represent themselves. By exploring organizations like the Freedom Partners Action Fund and the Center for Existential Risk, I attempted to better understand how the narrative is crafted. Ultimately, I learned there seems to be little structure to these narratives, with a simple straightforward vocabulary being the most consistent form.

I decided early on to create a website as the home for the organization to allow for easy distribution, increase visibility, and in an effort to add a bit of credence to the organization. From there, I fashioned the site after other superpac sites which include simple layouts and straightforward goals (usually funneling traffic to a donate button) . I decided on four key nav points:

About – Where the mission statement and founding of the association is discussed
Key Issues – Where the key issues the association feels most strongly about is discussed
Join – Where potential visitors who want to reach out to learn more can do so
News – A repository for real news stories which fit in the AIA realm.

For the exhibition, I’m intending on including some sort of collateral as a giveaway – potential options include postcards or stickers.

While writing the content for the site, I started to question a bit where I actually stand on issues. I found myself starting to write items which at first look seemed to fit the satire of the site that was clearly poor opinions, until I started to look a bit closer at the topic at hand. Initially, I thought I would be writing satirized content from the standpoint of issues I clearly did not share, but as I continued I found myself guilty of several of the cognitive biases the site addresses.

Placebo interactions are interactions that lead you to believe you have control of something when really you do not. They take advantage of the sloppiness in feedback loops, giving either superficial, incomplete, or false feedback in response to an input. The primary example, and my introduction to the subject was with “close door” buttons in elevators. It turns out that these frequently are not hooked up to the elevator system, even though they may light up when pressed. The feedback loop is such that the tiny feedback from the light is enough to convince you that the button works even if it has no observable effect on the door closing. My idea was to project placebo design into the future via a public service portal–think public service announcement but in web form–that alerts the public to their dangerous lack of control over the built environment.

Key to my idea was to include both placebo interactions that already exist–the elevator door button, thermostat controls in large office buildings–placebo interactions that could exist right now–voting for instance–and placebo interactions attached to products and activities that do not yet exist. The reader, if proceeding through the site in order, encounters the real, then the plausible, and then the absurd. By the end, the ridiculousness of the project should be apparent.

The project hopefully gets people to think about a couple of things. First, placebo design itself. The best part of this process for me was hearing all of the stories that people had about design that could be considered placebo design. It was gratifying for storytellers to have a category for a life event that may have gone previously unrecognized, or simply left as “manipulation.” In an exhibit setting, I would hope it could spur conversation around this same topic, and give people a new tool to categorize design they encounter. Second, I am interested to encourage people to think about what they would potentially be invited to control in the future, and what controls will be taken away. Placebo design, in my research, can be used to manipulate–as in gambling–or to help cope and give oneself back a sense of control (even if it is acknowledged to be a placebo). If we are moving to a world with more embedded computation receding to the periphery but controlling things in unseen ways, what will we forget that we have lost control of? Will systems designers let us have that control back?

Related Work

The project relates only mildly to Anthony Dunne and Fionna Raby’s placebo design project. The title is similar but they had a specific investment in understanding how people cope with invisible electromagnetic forces. Where both of these projects align might be in what Bill Gaver calls ambiguous design. Gaver describes ambiguous design as design that can be interpreted based on circumstance. This was precisely the case with Dunne and Raby’s project where they asked people to use speculative projects over a period of time in their homes. For placebo interaction, the ambiguity of function can be interpreted for a different impression of the system. Gaver hope that “by impelling people to interpret situations for themselves, it encourages them to start grappling conceptually with systems and their contexts” (233). While placebo interactions do not encourage this kind of reflection in themselves–after all, they usually don’t want you to speculate about their system at all, lest it be uncovered–my hope is to show the ambiguity of these interactions and help people to project forward with a healthy does of mistrust.

The project most similar, in some ways, might be James Auger’s audio tooth implant. The project works in a similar problem space but with very different means. If the placebo interactions site fools anyone, it should only be momentarily, unlike Auger’s extended deception. But both deal with plausible technologies and the model that people create of those technologies in their mind. Placebo interaction generates a model through use, the audio tooth simply through press.

Process & Reflection

My process was a poor one: it involved months of exploratory writing and research (I have over 6000 words in notes and reflections–a full seminar paper of wheel spinning) and intense frustration about not knowing how to embody any of the ideas that I found engaging about placebo interaction. I wish that I had pushed myself to build more as a part of the design process, rather than figuring out the very best way to build a placebo design fiction project (which I never did, anyway). From here, I wrote all of the copy for the website, developed the graphics and coded it up.

In my explorations, I read news, reviewed projects that I had found engaging, and pondered how to extract the narrative value from placebo interaction (here’s a great article on placebo design). Most importantly, I collected anecdotes about where placebo design is and where it may be going. I then categorize those stories and ideas in an attempt to abstract principles that I could use to design new speculative placebo interactions. While none of the ideas I collected are immediately in the project, the talks did end up informing all of my later SPIs.

We began with researching the history of prison systems, and how they supported mental illnesses, and utilized prisoners’ time in cheap labor. Using this background, we developed our concept to include such concepts, incorporating our statistics regarding the incredibly high percentages of mentally ill in prisons due to eradication of insane asylums, and scarcity of physiatric care facilities.

This led to our concept development, of harnessing the creativity of various perspectives found in different mental statuses.

We continued iterating through how the information would lay out in the context of the catalog and the roster, deciding on following the same format as the actual DSM editions that currently exist. Using their text as a starting point, we began adding in our own content, with descriptions and formulas for various forms of creative output.

Reflection

Our experience in creating this project was both enlightening, and informative. I had previously known very little about the varying mental disabilities, and how they were categorized in this particular system. I had also known very little about the actual statistics of mental illnesses in prisons, and the means by which they have been addressed. The project opened a large set of questions revolving around morality, and methods of aid ranging from extremely viable, to completely abstract and borderline cruel. It was an excellent experience in both learning and exploring.

Our concept centers on the history of mental illness aid within prisons, and how the system developed, functioned, and progressed. 70% of prisoners have some form of mental illness. Using this statistic, we developed a system in which prisoners are given the psychiatric aid they need, funded through companies who invest in the program to receive the output of creative levels of entrepreneurship found from prisoners, specified by their mental status.

The system is optimistic in its intent to provide aid to those who could not previously afford or access it, as well as give purpose to their time in prison, utilizing the entrepreneurship found in prison life today with makeshift methods of DIY with the little resources they have. However, the system holds a darker side in the alternative motivations of its funding. As we tell our story of the system’s history, we progress through the change from focus on prisoner-patient care for the mentally ill, to a system resembling the cheap labor exploitations corporations hold on prison labor, coupled with taking advantage of the mentally ill. We explore the range of cause and effects such a program could have on our current day prison systems.

BACK RESEARCH

Through much of our research, we have found a few articles that truly embody the statements our project highlights.

This article by Baratunde Thruston, titled “It’s Time for Tech to Embrace Prison Reform,” advocates for utilization of those in prisons to both diversify the workforce in technology, and to shake the current costs of letting these people rot away in jail cells.

This is mutually beneficial to both the prisoners and society in lowering the cultural disconnect after release, and he believes that it will help reduce recidivism in reintroducing fellow previous prisoners to society and immersion in tech. The entrepreneurship of prison life itself proves the resourcefulness of these people that could provide profound impacts on society’s tech immersion.

“Well, in [a prison] environment, innovation and iteration are happening out of necessity.” He then regales me with stories of inmates creating tattoo guns out of tape players and heating water without a microwave. In prison, terms like DIY, makers, hacking, and minimum viable product come to life every day.

We have focused our storyline in a similar pursuit, to explore what could happen if such resources were given larger consideration.

Many other articles have proved beneficial, looking into:

Path to Freedom

Very good video depicting prison life, and meditational techniques that can be used within prison culture.

This followed a similar vein in using theatre as a tool for mental illness. The Theatre of the Oppressed is a now world-renowned framework using roleplay to explore new possibilities, with the belief that, if we start by observing our actions and interactions, we can then go on to do things differently in the future. Other forms of the arts are also used at the Nise de Silveira hospital, producing work that has been critically acclaimed and exhibited in museums.

“Plato and Socrates believed that poets and priests could commune with the gods through accessing a kind of ‘divine madness’, thereby identifying the source of creative inspiration and insanity as one and the same, and the ‘mad artist’ has remained a persistent motif in many cultures, from Vincent van Gogh to Kanye West. Eccentric behaviour is indulged, encouraged or even expected in creative people, who enjoy a privileged position outside of the normal rules of society, and who often play up to this idea as if to underscore their untrammelled creativity.”

This research also helped source many of the reasonings behind some of the mental illnesses we chose to focus on, and the creative outlets they produce.

Seen this way, madness might be a blessing of sorts, a kind of portal into a unique vision of the world.